I was really happy to meet Marina and her two students, Ana and Nuri, at the Interlinguas school, where we had a lovely and fruitful chat that began with Ana's enjoyment of Enrique Vila-Matas' novel Dublinesque, via some memories I have of Trinity College, Dublin, where my apartment was located between Oscar Wilde's (a writer who makes Nuri laugh a lot) former lodgings and those of Samuel Beckett (whom Ana enjoys also). I spoke a little about my forthcoming book about the Tupamaros, and Nuri told us about a friend living in Barcelona who was a member of that group before fleeing to Catalunya in the early 1970s. From there we talked about crime fiction, which Nuri feels is an exciting but informative diversion, especially when it's not something like Agatha Christie, 'where all that matters is who committed the crime', and which Ana feels has taught her more about the world than her own travels. I shared my thought that because good crime fiction ought to focus on the structural reasons why a crime is committed, then it is something like the ideal form for a political novel. From there we moved on to parallels between cultural politics, language, and Ireland and Catalunya's similar relationships with their cultural heritage, before closing the class with a small Catalán lesson for me.